When you hear teal, you probably think of the colour which gets its name from the coloured area around the eyes of the common teal, and when you hear tealbook, you’re probably thinking of a notebook in the calming hue of teal, perfect for a journal or personal contact book … maybe even one you can keep your supplier contacts in!

But we all know the problems with a contact book. Contact information changes as people are shuffled around the company. Contacts leave the company, and you not only have to update their information but add a new contact. There is only a limited amount of room for notes. It’s really hard to share the information, and, if your peers are also using handwritten ‘teal journals’, get them to share the information, especially when you need it quickly.

That’s why supplier information management (SIM) modules and platforms were developed. All of the supplier and contact information in one place, accessible to, and updatable by, anyone in the organization. Plus, anyone can search the supplier database for suppliers new to them … but not new to the organization. This was one major limitation. Another was lack of community intelligence from peers. Were they selected or known for certain capabilities, or not? Do they have other customers for a product or service who will serve as references? Are they (now) capable of satisfying a minority designation or certification requirement (in a certain geography)? You can ask this, update the system to track it, but a community keeps this information up to date.

But most importantly, with traditional Supplier Information Management (SIM), you know what you know and you don’t know what you don’t know. You have no way of determining how many potential suppliers you don’t know about for any given category or requirement. Or how good the suppliers are for your needs relative to the suppliers you don’t know about.

That’s where a modern Supplier Information Management with Supplier Discovery platform comes into play. A modern supplier discovery platform, which is more than just a supplier network — as a supplier network is nothing more than a database of suppliers that have been transacted with through a particular platform, allows a community of organizations to keep track of, and provide information and recommendations on, potential suppliers (whether transacted through a platform or not); potential suppliers to self-identify and provide relevant information up front (such as diversity status and certifications); and all parties to share information of potential relevance.

tealbook‘s vision is to create a shared, trusted, supplier base with 100M suppliers that provides a central repository of reliable supplier intelligence that can be used as a stand-alone platform or integrated with your current ERP, sourcing, procurement, contract management, and other spend management systems of relevance through an easy to use API and an interface that is configurable to your organization’s processes and privacy preferences. tealbook already includes 1M vetted, and de-duplicated, suppliers with rich insights and expects to grow daily at an exponential rate to reach 4 million within 12 months.

And while this three-year-old start-up doesn’t have the 100M supplier database yet, they have the solid foundations for a reliable, scalable, extensible, and integratable community supplier intelligence platform that can be configured to your organization’s needs. That is getting the attention of some of the biggest organizations and consultancies in North America.

In the tealbook platform, a user can easily do a search for potential suppliers, review verified supplier profiles, review community generated expertise tags (similar to individual specialty tags on Linkedin), review provided supplier content, create a supplier list for vetting, interact with the supplier to get more information, interact with her teammates for initial vetting and review, and then select a subset of those suppliers for export for consideration in her sourcing/procurement project. And she can do it through the web platform, or the mobile app if she is documenting new potential suppliers at trade shows. Plus the database of connections and employees is always up to date, so she knows who to contact, and who she knows, or knows of, at the potential supplier.

Supplier Discovery (incumbent or new) can be quite time consuming without such a platform. Most organizations would resort to searching online databases, getting recommendations from professional societies, going to events to get information from peers, and so on. Discovery can take weeks on its own when a proper platform with a community built and maintained platform can knock that down to hours. And the information is a lot more reliable than that obtained from a single source. This reduces the time, effort, and risk to discover, pre-vet, and qualify new suppliers substantially — which makes for an improved sourcing and procurement process.

And the search in the tealbook platform is quite powerful — it’s not just keyword, industry, tag — it’s also specific to your data and connections — it’s semantic and it uses machine learning to increasingly improve the relevance of supplier recommendations. And that’s key to identifying the right suppliers for you. And it’s a great choice even if your platform has a basic SIM module. For example, tealbook complements newer sourcing platforms such as ScoutRFP (and eliminates the need for a supplier network entirely), Coupa customers can add on tealbook to fill in the holes in the Coupa S2P platform, and Ariba customers are, as you may have guessed from above, finding it provides that missing piece: mobile, user friendly and socially derived supplier intelligence. With tealbook, they are finally able to rapidly and easily look up updated supplier data, identify and qualify known or new suppliers without going through an extensive process before initiating a sourcing event in Ariba.

In other words, if you are looking to know more about suppliers who have already transacted with your company or regularly need to discover new suppliers (including increasing access to innovative and diversity suppliers) check out tealbook. It might be the platform for you.